The Glassyness (If I May Be Allowed
The Expression) Of The Surface, Throws, In My Opinion, A False
Light On Some Parts Of The Picture; And When You Approach It, The
Joinings Of The Pieces Look Like So Many Cracks On Painted
Canvas.
Besides, this method is extremely tedious and expensive.
I went to see the artists at work, in a house that stands near
the church, where I was much pleased with the ingenuity of the
process; and not a little surprized at the great number of
different colours and tints, which are kept in separate drawers,
marked with numbers as far as seventeen thousand. For a single
head done in Mosaic, they asked me fifty zequines. But to return
to the church. The altar of St. Peter's choir, notwithstanding
all the ornaments which have been lavished upon it, is no more
than a heap of puerile finery, better adapted to an Indian pagod,
than to a temple built upon the principles of the Greek
architecture. The four colossal figures that support the chair,
are both clumsy and disproportioned. The drapery of statues,
whether in brass or stone, when thrown into large masses, appears
hard and unpleasant to the eye and for that reason the antients
always imitated wet linen, which exhibiting the shape of the
limbs underneath, and hanging in a multiplicity of wet folds,
gives an air of lightness, softness, and ductility to the whole.
These two statues weigh 116,257 pounds, and as they sustain
nothing but a chair, are out of all proportion, inasmuch as the
supporters ought to be suitable to the things supported. Here are
four giants holding up the old wooden chair of the apostle Peter,
if we may believe the book De Identitate Cathedrae Romanae, Of
the Identity of the Roman Chair. The implements of popish
superstition; such as relicks of pretended saints, ill-proportioned
spires and bellfreys, and the nauseous repetition of
the figure of the cross, which is in itself a very mean and
disagreeable object, only fit for the prisons of condemned
criminals, have contributed to introduce a vitious taste into the
external architecture, as well as in the internal ornaments of
our temples. All churches are built in the figure of a cross,
which effectually prevents the eye from taking in the scope of
the building, either without side or within; consequently robs
the edifice of its proper effect. The palace of the Escurial in
Spain is laid out in the shape of a gridiron, because the convent
was built in consequence of a vow to St. Laurence, who was
broiled like a barbecued pig. What pity it is, that the labours
of painting should have been so much employed on the shocking
subjects of the martyrology. Besides numberless pictures of the
flagellation, crucifixion, and descent from the cross, we have
Judith with the head of Holofernes, Herodias with the head of
John the Baptist, Jael assassinating Sisera in his sleep, Peter
writhing on the cross, Stephen battered with stones, Sebastian
stuck full of arrows, Laurence frying upon the coals, Bartholomew
flaed alive, and a hundred other pictures equally frightful,
which can only serve to fill the mind with gloomy ideas, and
encourage a spirit of religious fanaticism, which has always been
attended with mischievous consequences to the community where it
reigned.
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